


The Sea-Girl

by batyatoon



Category: Fairy Tales & Related Fandoms, The Little Mermaid - All Media Types
Genre: Deconstruction, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Short
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-16
Updated: 2018-07-16
Packaged: 2019-06-11 07:06:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15310059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/batyatoon/pseuds/batyatoon
Summary: The prompt was: "Rewrite a classic fairy tale by telling it backwards. The end is now the beginning."(Originally postedhere. )





	The Sea-Girl

Once upon a time there was a wavelet who fell in love with a prince.  A foolish little wavelet, a scattering of sea foam and nothing more, but it saw the prince walking along the shore hand in hand with his bride-to-be, and it longed for him.  And the longing was so powerful that the wavelet gathered itself together and shaped itself into the body of a girl, much like the prince’s bride, to become what the prince clearly most wanted.

The sea-girl was, alas, a poor copy of the prince’s maiden; she was unsteady on her new feet, which ached with every step she took on the dry land, and she had no voice but the sea’s slow rushing murmur.  She took to haunting the palace, hoping every moment to see the prince again.  When the palace folk saw her, they would generally mistake her for a beggar, and either give her a coin or a crust of bread or tell her to be on her way – and with no voice, she could not tell them what she truly needed, or ask for their help.

The day came when the prince and his bride were wed, and the sea-girl’s heart broke within her.  She wandered down to the shore, weeping without a sound, and stepped into the sea.  If she could not become a wavelet again, she thought, then at least she could die with the water around her.

But when the water closed over her head, she found she could not even drown and lose her sorrow in death; for even in the body of a girl, she was still of the sea as she had always been.  And again she wept without a sound, her tears mingling with the water around her.

One can only weep for so long, though, even when one’s heart has broken; and then there was nothing to do but go on again.  She found that her feet ached less in the sea, but they were not much better for swimming than they had been for walking.  And thus slowly, limping through the water, she finally came to the grotto of the sea witch, to whom all the sorrows of the sea will come sooner or later.

Now the sea witch was very old – indeed, she still is – and she had seen every kind of sorrow in the sea at least once in her long life.  So it was that she was able to look into the eyes of the sea-girl, eyes as young and depthless as the foam that sparkles on the shore, and know the name of her sorrow without needing to hear a word.  Fortunately, indeed, as the sea-girl could not have spoken, even had she known the name of her own sorrow – which in truth she did not, knowing only that her misery was as deep as her life and could not possibly be borne.

 _It is not so_ , the witch told her, gentle and pitiless.   _I know it feels that way, but trust me.  Your story can end here, and be nothing more than the longing and the sorrow you have felt until now; or your story can continue, and become as deep as the sea itself, and leave this sorrow behind, no deeper than a ripple at the surface of your life.  I cannot make you choose._

The sea-girl looked up, at the sunlight glinting on the surface far above them, bright as the prince’s eyes; and she listened, and heard far off the singing of the mermaids, unlike any of the voices of the land; and she chose.

The witch turned her legs into a fish’s tail, and gave her a voice like the ones she had heard, and took from her in trade the longing that had first given her shape.  And the little sea-girl, now a little mermaid, felt hope and delight ripple through her heart, fresher and stronger than the sorrow; and she swam off to follow the distant singing voices, to meet and join her sisters.


End file.
